Still the king of all VLC apps – VLC Remote Pro! Review

What’s the Blazes happened to my review!? (to “Sifu_Char”: You CAN use VLCr on more than one iPhone, as long as all devices are connected to the same local area network. You can even use VLC Remote on two iPhones and one Android if you have it installed on there as well. The set up for VLC Remote only needs to be run once, after that you can connect as many devices to VLC as you have devices that have VLC remote installed on, and they don’t all have to be iPhones, The android app detects VLC after it has been set up just like the iPhone version. Hope that helps.) I am afraid this app has fallen into disuse over the last couple of years, mostly due to many people moving to an easier platform to maintain: namely PLEX and PLEX pass. But back when iPhones were a new deal, people mostly used one app and one app only to maintain their private video library’s: and that would be VLC aka VideoLAN. Video LAN as in Local Area Network, where we could network several home computers, share all of the media libraries, create multitudes of playlists and then have ongoing movie play back for days and days and years even. And wouldn’t such an app require a remote control for us couch potato types? Enter VLC Remote. Now we could have access to every of the cool features of VLC, change aspect ratio, language, alternate streams, we could play back DVDs, Blu-ray’s, MKV, FLV, AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, and many other obscure formats that (OGG) all play back beautifully from one app. I had the privilege of beta testing this app for a couple of years and a lot of the cool features in this app I remember discussing, in fact the way that it is now is the direct result of a core group of us who used to bounce ideas back-and-forth between us and the developer. Who is a great guy and he even put out a “VLC remote classic” for me and one other person and I still have that installed in one of my devices. There was even a “headset mode“, an EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE with skull and cross bones warning, which works actually pretty well except that you have to manually sync up the audio on the hand devices to what’s playing on the TV, but it does give you a way of having a headset on from 20 feet away and you don’t have to have a 50 foot headphone cable (?). Is headset mode still there? YES! I was just using it. These days most of the cool things that we were able to do with VLC we can now do with Plex media server, and so I feel badly that from my perspective this app has fallen along on the wayside to the point where my iOS 11 App Store automatically offloads the app on occasion ☹️. But whenever I do finally fire up VLC on my home network, I still use this app to manipulate it rather than having to get off my rear end, drag my butt over to the computer and mess with the interface there, in fact the combination of VLC Remote and Mobile Mouse gives me the ability to fire up VLC from Mobile Mouse ? ? and then I can move to VLC remote to access the app. Lately the developer has been creating something called the ChillRemote which actually can give you a Remote for things like Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and it works pretty well, my only complaint with that is that it has a subscription feature to give you access to more features of the app and I loathe and despise subscription features. Mostly because that most developers that instigate a subscription use it to immediately bilk their former users out of a lot more money than the paid features usually cost in a one time payment. Rob does not do that though. He doesn’t ask very much for the subscription for ChillRemote, but I hate the concept of subscriptions, especially if it includes removal of advertisements which used to be a $.99 in app purchase for most apps. Had to rewrite this whole review from scratch because I had a respring right in the middle of it ??☹️???
Review by XweAponX on VLC Remote Pro!.